In this day and age, content marketing is an integral part of any business’s marketing strategy. High-quality content can spread online extremely easily, so generating that kind of content is a great way to get more eyes on your business. Despite the obvious benefits, content marketing isn’t something to be taken lightly. Generating valuable content takes time, and building an effective content marketing plan is no easy feat. It’s a high-risk, high-reward proposition, as a failed content strategy wastes a significant amount of time.

There’s no shortage of sites and software designed to help content marketers succeed. Taking advantage of the right tools can be the difference between a content marketing campaign that never gets off the ground, and a campaign that connects with your target audience. With the following five tools, you can improve every aspect of your content marketing.

1. BuzzSumo

When it comes to brainstorming ideas, you couldn’t ask for a better aid than BuzzSumo. This tool uses analytics to show you which content is trending. You can search for specific terms, filter for specific types of content, compare how content is doing share-wise across different social networks, and determine the topics related to your business that are currently the most popular. The information provided by BuzzSumo is useful for creating content ideas and giving your content a title that gets the most clicks possible.

BuzzSumo also provides information on the sites and social media influencers who are getting the most traction. If you plan on advertising your content on websites or through social media, this data is invaluable. Social media influencers in particular can send significant traffic to your content, provided you select the right influencers.

2. Curata

Even if you have great content ideas, actually generating that content takes time. Depending on your content needs, you may not have enough time to maintain a steady stream of content. Curata offers a content creation software and a data-driven content marketing platform. It helps you find fresh content from hundreds of thousands of sources, which you can then promote. One of its most impressive features is its self-learning engine which constantly adapts to your content preferences to find content that better matches your needs.

Organising and publishing content through Curata is fairly simple, as it can integrate with CMS, social curation, email and marketing automation. When you’ve tied your other accounts to Curata, you can publish content across any of those accounts with a single click. It also uses analytics to see how successful the content you publish is with your audience, which helps you tweak your content marketing strategy as necessary.

3. Buffer

The most effective way to develop and reach your audience through social media is by posting consistently throughout the day. However, it’s a hassle to interrupt your day every few hours for social media posts, especially if you’re managing multiple accounts. With Buffer, you can automate social media posts, scheduling as many posts as you want in advance. While there are many social media automation tools available, Buffer ranks at the top because it’s easy to use and it works with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.

Buffer lets you build a content queue and then schedule times throughout the day for all your social media posts. Since certain times of day are best for engagement, you can make sure your posts always go out at optimal times. If you want to add content to the queue, you can do so at any time on your computer or through the convenient mobile app.

4. Contently

It’s important to keep your content marketing operation organised, but with more and more businesses hiring remote workers, it can be challenging to manage all the people in a global content marketing operation. The Contently platform simplifies the process, allowing you and the rest of your team to collaborate on ideas, pitches, and assignments. You can keep everyone in the loop using inline commenting, custom email notifications, and a tag-enabled messaging system. Contently also offers cloud storage for all your content.

The platform has project management tools that enable you to set deadlines, monitor progress on stories, and approve work. You can use Contently to manage both employees and freelancers. With tools to secure legal approval for content and set up invoices, Contently covers you throughout every part of the content creation process.

5. Outbrain

Getting your content discovered by your target audience can be just as difficult as creating that content. As the leading content discovery platform on the web, Outbrain is the fastest and most effective way to amplify your audience. This platform does cost money, but if you can make it work with your marketing budget, it can help your content reach a significantly larger audience.

Outbrain works by placing your content on popular local and national sites as a story suggestion. Since your audience is already checking out content on these sites, it’s perfect timing for such a suggestion. When they finish up the story, they’ll look for something to read next, and your content will be front and centre. The platform works with virtually any piece of content. Whether you want to spread a blog post, an infographic, a video, or something else, you can do so with Outbrain.

There is quite a bit of planning, research, and management that goes into effective content marketing. However, you can save yourself time by choosing tools to handle some of the more mundane tasks. Putting these five tools to work allows you to keep your focus on more important aspects of your content marketing, helping you get the best return on your marketing efforts.

About the author

Jill Phillips is a freelance writer hailing from Buffalo. She is a tech enthusiast, who loves to share her insight on various media, tech and business topics. When she is not writing, Jill enjoys taking photos and hiking with her dog. You can contact her via Twitter @jillphlps